Easy to get started, outstanding customer support

I am using Stackify to monitor a multi-tier application in AWS, and was amazed at how easy it was to immediately get all of the servers reporting data on the app with no extra configuration. Our development team has been equally pleased with how simple it has been to have the application's logs fed right to Stackify and accessible from a single dashboard for our product support team. On top of that, the communication from the company has been outstanding. Even though our app is small, they have given us all the attention in the world. The team at Stackify has even provided multiple conference calls demoing their solution to different players in our company throughout the development cycle. And not a single bit of communication we received from Stackify during our evaluation was sales-focused - they really wanted to make sure that we knew exactly what we would be getting. After initially evaluating a competitor whose products seemed overly confusing and whose costs would have exceeded our total AWS bill, Stackify was an easy choice.

Pros

Very easy to use - doesn't get in the way of development with a steep learning curve. Awesome, accessible support team always at the ready, which was especially nice when we started using more of the advanced features of AWS. For example, when we were talking about writing scripts to help automate parts of our environment, they sent over some scripts to take care of automatically installing Stackify within the hour, saving me a lot of time and research. As a newbie to AWS and the cloud, this saved hours of work.

Cons

Honestly, we haven't experienced a single drawback is using Stackify as an APM provider.

Great bug detection and fixing solution!

My overall experience with the Stackify Retrace is quite satisfying. I can easily afford the software for the great features it is offering. I can develop applications more efficiently and effectively. It is easy to use. I will recommend it to all the programmers or app developers out there.

Pros

Stackify Retrace is an excellent application monitoring and bug fixing solution. I love the bug management system of the Retrace. It is also highly effective and efficient in fixing them. It can easily monitor in real-time how the app is working and the exact intervals at which the features of the app didn't work correctly or when the app crashed. It keeps all the logs of the app so that, it will be easier to detect and fix the failures. I found it very useful while developing .net applications. The dashboard is one of the main highlights. You can quickly get all the details like error logs, crash report, etc. in only one place.

Cons

Customer response staff is very supportive and helps you to figure out your issues. But, on an incident, I got a very late response from them. I think it MUST be improved. Moreover, I find the log filtering a little tricky. Many a times, the log parameters which I don't want to see in the report were also there. It makes the analyzing process slow.

Some really good, some really bad.

Initial impressions were great, we installed it on our staging and then production web servers. It provided an interesting look into the actual site performance without all the server noise. After some time both environments had sites that exhibited issues with the stackify agent. High page load times, timeouts, and general app instability was seen on some, but not all web apps on the server. These issues seemingly appeared out of no-where so perhaps it was an auto-update but we couldn't spend the time troubleshooting. The only quick solution was remove the stackify software from those servers. The uninstall did not clean up after itself and left header information from stackify on all sites and all files seemed to remain in the installation directory. Tech support supplied incorrect remediation information for the header information issue and it caused the server downtime while the VM snapshot was reverted. Googling turned up the correct way of removing their changes. Overall I'd say the beneficial insights gained into the app performance provided by the service were negated by the downtime and headaches created by the agent. Also we lost quite a bit of trust by the dev team in our efforts to provide them a stable platform for their applications. When ever there is an issue now the first question is, "Is Stackify still on that server?"

An amazing product for A to Z bug tracking and fixing

Our product management and testing has become more easy with the use of Retrace, kudos team !

Pros

We really loved their centralized logging feature, Stackify helps us more to find bugs on the system and to take proper measures in time. The main interesting feature we noted is that we can run tests and Stackify will revert back with the accurate results, also a proper monitoring on the stack can be done using Retrace. The major advantage is that one can do all the needful activities like code profiling, monitoring and logging on the single system. We dont need to depend on any other third parties for the same.

Cons

The code deployment system has lot of issues as it takes time to integrate onto to their system and the deployment takes lot of time. Rectify this issue and you will have a great tool and platform.

Finding failures is easy with Stackify

Stackify gives peace of mind when it becomes extremely hard to find bugs. Just go for logs and you get to exact point where the application stalled. It gives alot information about the application. It is one of many tools that .net developer must have.

Pros

It gives in depth knowledge of what all is happening with our application. .net developer finds it very supportive in daily tasks. After one time setup it quiet easy to use. We debug with the help of log monitoring techniques given by Stackify.

Cons

Filtering logs is not as easy with Stackify. We end up searching through many logs unwantedly sometimes. But it gives Stackify power to find everything which is also good sometimes.

Stackify Retrace has been monumental in our day-to-day monitoring of our 70+ Azure VMs.

Streamline's my workflow; I don't have to visit each machine individually as they're all in my Stackify portal.

Pros

Dashboard, reporting at a glance, custom parameters/alerts, super-scalable,. Also, they have 3 levels you can set, which is really nice to not have a 4-alarm fire for 80% mem usage.

Cons

Setting up parameters to monitor can be challenging to figure out, but just because there are so many. You really need to know what you want to monitor.

DevOps out of the box!

Until Stackify, there was no one tool to do monitoring, performance dashboards, log aggregation, and more. This same technology would come with 5 or more software/hardware products and 5 or more bills as well. Stackify does all of this in one package and provides you the actionable insights necessary to target problems when they happen and point you directly to where they are happening and all systems/software affected.

Pros

Log aggregation is by far my favorite feature. Beyond this, the dashboards provide the window directly to your systems, stacks and help interrelate software and hardware systems, even across multiple data centers and cloud sites.

Cons

Putting on my software engineer hat, I would like to have the ability to prescribe templates for how I want to view certain aggregations of logs for certain app stacks to better represent that stack right out of the box instead of having to select it each time.

Cheapest APM which can compete with market leaders

Overall all very much satisfied for choosing this tool

Pros

Cost. Its very cheap and has 85% functionalities provided by the market leaders.

Cons

Setting up initially can be little tough.

makes DEV Ops so much easier

In most of my career I've been a consultant at major corporations, mostly concerned with 'getting it done'. Most of these companies have entire departments focused on operations and don't need me doing that job, but some of my smaller clients have asked that I take these roles on as well and until I found Stackify I felt like there was too much. I still feel that way but at least now I can see trouble spots and drill in. Instead of having to spend all my time finding the hotspot I can now spend that time fixing the hotspot.

Pros

I love the graphs, and the details and the ease of navigation, plus when I was stuck on a particular issue, the Stackify support was very helpful.

Cons

The documentation is there for sure, but more is always better.

Easy solution to get centralized logs in a hurry.

Scouring the web for centralized logging solutions to use for a Java-based solution I am currently working at. I came across Stackify. Initially it was somewhat down my list of candidates - with much more flashy. But after trying a bunch we ended up with Stackify due to how easy it was to get useful logs into the system. And how well it works with Java out of the box.

Pros

* Easy to set up for Java * Intelligently collects and groups Java exceptions allows

Cons

- Does not really provide any tools advanced analyses of logs - Requires some additional code to proper shut down - The logging appender itself throws connection exceptions fairly often that ends up in the general overview of how the application is doing

Stackify has saved us so much time and resources

Not only was the set-up great by the Stackify support staff, but the data that we were able to extrapolate from the information provided helped reduce pages error and slow loading on over 30% of our internal .net ERP. We are extremely thrilled to have this software working, and with the great historics that it provides, if the server ever has a fault, I don't have to worry about tracking down what caused the crash before getting the server back up again. With Stackify I can just go through the logs of the user sessions at anytime, so I can look through what happened later, instead of making sure that I nailed down the issue before rebooting the server and losing info about what 'currently was causing the hangup'. Thanks for the great software guys.

Pros

The ability to drill down into an issue is phenomenal, you can spend your time wisely with this feature. Focus on your biggest problems first right? So, start on the dashboard and just start diving in on the top issues from there. You get to see what went wrong, and all of the calls and requests to the server by simply drilling down, it makes sure that my small dev team is spending their time on the issues that will have the biggest day to day impact for our users.

Cons

Slight learning curve, but with any robust software that is always the case. Thankfully, the support staff is willing to go through extensive deep-dives into explaining how the software works.

Immediately knew we needed it

We had been searching for a good APM solution for a better price than the goldmines others were charging for too few features. We found Stackify and immediately knew that it was the right fit for us. It was very EASY to get useful data right away with a minimum of knowledge of the Stackify product.

Pros

Data is easily visually consumable. Traces make it easy to tell what calls are problematic.

Cons

Averaging data over a time period. For example, I want to know what the Average CPU or RAM usage is for a certain time period and not just see a graph and guess the average. Also, better delineation between server and webapp monitors (why do each share some fields?). Finally, need the ability to apply more than one monitor to a server or webapp.

It is awesome and helps us to trace the logs quickly than any other tool

Easy of use for any developer to debug and trace the issue

Pros

Retrace give detailed logs. I used new relic before, and i feel Stackify much worth than new relic. Stackify's customer support is much responsive. Also, it was easy to set up on azure and get it running.

Cons

The search feature can be improved a bit, when i plug in some parameters, it is not returning results as expected

Best in Market - In Budget - Gives In-depth insight of your application

Performance and Error monitoring of application on different servers. We include both web applications and APIs as well.

Pros

There are a lot of features that one can like about STACKIFY. To begin with, we have alerts that can be setup when you cross the threshold value for a particular variable that you are concerned about. You have a fancy dashboard which gives you a good idea of what is happening around with your application. The other good thing is the segregation of alerts into three parts - warning alert, critical alert and outage alert. We have a variety of filters given in the tool making it easier for the user to get to the issue without wasting much time - Filter by error, Filter by logs, filter by APM. Implementation of this tool is as easy and simple as it can be.

Cons

Dashboard is something that can still be improved and make more detail oriented. Slow SQL Queries can be more drilled down to get to the root level as to which query is taking more time.

Excellent tool to track your application logs

It is an excellent tool to track your application logs on all the environments. It enabled to capture crash logs, error logs and capture statistics and more.

Pros

Stackify Dashboard which allows me to monitior my required app at a time on single clic.k, and the error logs with app name and environment name

Cons

Filters in logs search, it is bit confusing. It could have improved and enriched to be more user friendly

Quick error resolution

was a long time customer of a competitor's tool since early 2013 and thought I was happy with what I was getting. I cannot say that price wasn't a consideration in my decision but I read quite a few positive reviews and after reading one that went something like "...in just a couple days of installing Stackify we found an error on our site we didn't even know was occurring previously..." it was decided that I should at least test Stackify. Of course, I immediately liked the interface and the ability to search logs was an awesome touch as well, but what hooked me was within 24 hours of installing Stackify we found an Exception that has existed since the launch of a new ad campaign we started 10 months ago. Most events/errors were trapped and reporting on this process because of its importance, but somehow this one thing wasn't. The error existed for approximately 10 months and we were never aware of it; IE, the competitor's product never barked about it. I immediately canceled my contract with the competitor and signed on with Stackify.

Pros

Quick error resolution, detailed error from exceptions, fantastic customer support

Cons

So far none that I have seen

Retrace Review

Everything with retrace has been easy from installation to customer support when we do have questions. The data that we get from the application helps us be proactive in finding issues before our customers notice any issues.

Pros

Ease of getting data this is otherwise difficult to obtain.

Cons

There are a few features that we would still like since we host multiple web sites and would like to be able to compare sites against each other.

At Paycor we use Stackify for our application logging. We are very satisfied with the results so far

Pros

Ease of use and setup. We have about 60 applications setup using stackify across 30 development teams

Cons

the tags (#xyz) do not work with guids. We are trying to track a "correlation id" throughout our logs and thought that tags would help us but they dont seem to work out of the box with guids. We would also like to see the ability to restrict access based on environment.

easy to install and easy to review reports.

optimization opportunies

Pros

overall how easy it is to install and get going. I also like the reports and all the information it provides at your finger tips. It has helped us expose areas of concern and track our optimization progress.

Cons

its been buggy at times. Crashing our entire server and causing is us to turn it off until the next patch fixes the problem.

Feature rich, easy to use, very cheap APM tool available in the market

Pros

Stackify gives a complete picture of your code and the server behavior with server monitoring, errors, logs, metrics and insight which provides testers and developers with a clear idea of the performance bottlenecks. Its very cheap compared to its competitors

Cons

At this cost, you can't actually find lot of cons. It shows you in which part of the request is taking time but it does not drill down to point out the code snippet causing the issue. I am using retrace on performance test servers and not on prod

Work great!

APM of our stack

Pros

There support is great, we had a pro with ram on our App pools not showing the right data but they work trough and fix the problem was great to have that level of service

Cons

I wish it had more plugs in for our deployment software Octopus, let been able to have a deploy tag on the APM etc

Azure monitoring

We use Stackify about 3 years for monitoring our Azure infrastructure. For last year service increased stability and functionality. It help us in our critical service monitoring and supporting.

Stackify retrace is very beneficial for application developer.

Pros

It's inform the developer to very quickly bug and issue in application. Developer can check the bug and starting to slow the issue. That's why product will be increased day by day and user can satisfy that bug will be slow and they can not suffer next time.

Cons

Some time bug will be resolve developer side then after is showing is a bug.its not every time it do some time other wise is very safisyant to use a developer.

We have been using Stackify to monitor and improve our web apis to great success.

Pros

Easy to setup and track multiple environments. Informative information. Timely and highly customizable alerts

Cons

IIS has to be restarted when updating the client and changing certain settings. Cannot generate total through put reports easily (total api calls by api by time period).

Retracing my Experience...

Stackify Retrace has enabled our team to increase customer support and satisfaction through error identification and resolution. Retrace's ease allows team members that lack a coding background to identify errors and provide the information to the development team for a quick recovery. I have personally identified high risk errors, provided the information to the team, and the error was resolved within the hour by utilizing Retrace. It provides a much needed transparency and assists in product confidence.

Pros

ease of use and quality of the product

It is a simple config change to your app and you are good to go. Very user friendly & easily to use.

Pros

Filters are great. You can filter accurately by date and current hours. The software gives the ability to filter by environment and by log level. Easy to read and sort.

Cons

The black UI. It would be great if the UI is more catchy. Can have the ability to trace live logs.

The best .NET APM tool

We were using New Relic, but it wasn't providing us the info we wanted and it was so expensive that we couldn't afford having it on all prod servers. I've been using Stackify in a .net , Azure based webapp, the app is with high traffic subscription service, and solid services is essential. In one case we were using Stackify to identify an issue that made the site slow occasionally, it was very hard to pin point the source of the problem. Once installed it was a very fast process and we identified the combination of issues that lead to this behavior. Having the log and error data as part of the detailed trace was tremendous help. And seeing all the logs recorded when an exception was thrown is a cool little feature. Personally I can watch their real-time tailing all day long.

Pros

Easy to use Simple installation In-line log and error data in trace Integration of performance management with log management Lower cost than most competitors

Cons

Need to improve their mobile support APM needed in more languages

Invaluable development tool

Stackify has become a standard tool from me which has proved invaluable for diagnosing and troubleshooting. The ease of setup and low cost makes it a no brainer. The ability to search and filter exceptions help immensely.

Pros

Search and filtering capabilities make it a powerful tool.

Retace is a must-have tool.

We were having performance issues in PROD but as if often the case we were not able to reproduce those issues in development. Retrace gave us a lightweight real time line of sight to our system. We simply cannot live without Retrace right now. i recommend it for every project I work on.

Pros

fast, easy great support

Cons

dashboard. would love a new dashboard and ability to save/bookmark timeslices for review later.

Great software, affordable and accurate

Stacking retrace meets all the requirements from a developers perspective. It give most accurate details and it's easy to use.

Pros

It's easy to use and accurate

Cons

The details sometimes needs to be hidden deep

I love this software!

I am able to see server issues as they're creeping up, rather than after my customers are already upset and ready to leave!

Pros

I love how I can accurately monitor average calls on all of my servers per application! This really helps isolate problems.

Cons

I just wish I knew how to navigate this software better. I know it does so much more that I simply don't understand!

Good and easy to use, but there are difficulties on the way

The service is pretty easy to use, very good too, but we found some difficulties on our servers on the way, like we have experienced a high cpu use and restarted the Stackify agent and it solved the problem.

Pros

Easy, good, works

Cons

There are some problems with the agent sometimes.

Stackify is useful across multiple departments within the company. From Development to Support.

Pros

Stackify allows me to keep an eye on my services and servers from an easy dashboard. This allows me to foresee all interruptions and make adjustments before end users feel it.

Cons

We recently experienced an update to Stackify that affected our system performance, but it was quickly corrected and patched.

Great product, and so simple to use

We used this to monitor out live sites and to diagnose performance problems. We can run it in normal mode most of the time and turn on APM when we need to diagnose problems and only need to pay the extra for the time when APM is running.

Pros

Easy of use and the pay as you go model for the APM

Cons

None I can think of

Great tool to do error followup

I use the free version so I can't complain about the pricing and didn't need support up till now. I especially like the fact you can flag errors as 'resolved', 'ignore' etc. What would be helpful here is an auto update of the list when I flag one. To keep the list up-to-date, I always need to refilter it every time taking quite a bit of time (search, filter by project)...

Pros

Clean and easy to do some followup.

Cons

Some missing auto-refresh of the current list.

Positive, essential

Pros

The tail, tagging & trace

Cons

It's the UI and dashboard (seems like it's been in Beta forever!). They're awful, borderline dreadful. Please apologies for my comments to the dev whom did this. You definitely need a UX designer to help you in this space; it's the only thing that let's your product down.

What a powerful log management solution

We love the Stackify error & log management solution it was the perfect solution (after a months long journey trialing numerous logging services!). It provides you with all the info to easily find the source of an exception. We also monitor our logs to ensure that there are no spikes of log especially around important KPIs and specific customers.

Pros

We especially like being able to go from getting notification of exception that is trending in the wrong direction to see all the logs recorded around that exception. Stackify also have very friendly and helpful support team

Cons

We haven't had the time to evaluate their monitoring solution, but we're looking forward to do that.

The server tracker

Overall a very good package for developers like me to track my whole code status at one go.

Pros

It loads automatically all my codes independent of their environments and provides a very qualitative support for the bug detection and helps in debugging. I can keep track of all the things happening on my server.

Cons

Bundles up all the report and sometimes multiple deployments causes errors.

Stackify is excellent for gauging system performance.

Server and campaign monitoring.

Pros

In my day to day use, I need to know system performance, if we are having lag spikes or server functionality. That's s provides that at a glance, so it can easily be monitored throughout the day.

Cons

Sometimes when loading new tabs or searches it can produce timeouts and there is a small gap in wait for it to recover, but nothing major generally.

i jsut use it for looking at error logs

logs and stats

Pros

logs are perfect it will show up all the error logs that you logged from your service... and i will use stacify to even look at the stats of an application .... Something like the Database calls.

Cons

takes sometime to show up logs.. Not Instant that is the only problem that i faced in this less that 6 months of interaction with stacify

Great tool, but the web app to dig into the data is not friendly.

Pros

The APM dashboards and server metrics have been excellent to use. I highly recommend it to anyone using a similar software stack.

Cons

UI can be slow/clunky to use. Metrics don't always show up unless collected from all servers. Dashboard feature doesn't seem complete. Can't share or give access to others with giving admin privileges.

Dependable service but the website's user interface is direful

Pros

Dependable, no fake alerts, fast and correct notifications. Good integrations for slack and other platforms.

Cons

Unusable website. Randomly placed menu items, if I would like to change some settings or change notification groups I've no clue where should I click. UX: 0

Quick Easy APM

Stackify allows you to get an un-monitored application to something that has alerting, analytics, performance, log management and much more quickly and easily. Without even changing code you can begin monitoring your application. They are one of the first to support .net core. If you use it the way it was designed, it works great. My only gripe is the log querying and reporting. If you like their reports, great, if you want to create your own... this product is probably not for you.

Pros

Ease of use

Cons

Customization

Nice and neat way to read data coming from the system

Very surprising how easy it was to set this up on azure and to get it running. Shows error logs and debug information in a neat and readable way.

Pros

How the logs are displayed and how the settings are very easy to manipulate

Cons

Had some problems with logs appearing for wrong apps but was fixed after restart.

Great devops for Azure apps.

We were up and running with Retrace APM on our Azure App Service WebAPI within an hour (just add NuGet package, Azure Extension, and Azure App Settings w/ API Key). Insight was gained into slow running calls of our endpoint within a day's worth of data. Value seems amazing vs the other big APM out there. Go for it.

Oluwatobi' s Review

Its very helpful to be able to see metrics from my application in real time. I don't have to log in to a database.

Simple and effective

Pros

Price point is very attractive. Easy to deploy. This has been a privilege to contribute

Cons

Poor iOS support , native app support need a lot more consideration. . This has been a privilege to contribute

All in One place!

With Stackify, monitoring and analyzing all our software environments have become easier. The interactive dashboard and error logs are the tools what engineers love to actively use to improve the software quality and availability. On the application integration side, Stackify comes with a smooth one two step process. Developed wires it with application easily with predefined steps. Adding context to the issues and catagorizing audit logs will save tons of time in real time scenarios.

Non-Developer

I am not a software developer, I just work for a company that has a lot. However, I do use Retrace on a regular basis to identify errors that I come across on our sites. It really helps bridge the gap between what I'm seeing and the information our developers need to correct potential problems. Not being a developer, however, means a lot of the functionality and information presented is over my head and looks like jargon.

Stackify for me

There are many problems in configuration. And little explanation for impalement. And little widget, and does not support the installation spun enough to log and errorr.